Seven Myths About Reagan, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War

History is the only subject in which everyone is sure they already know the answer and almost nobody has opened the book. Ask a college sophomore how the Cold War ended and you will get one of two stories. In the first, a cowboy actor in the White House nearly blew up the planet and was rescued by a wise Soviet reformer. In the second, a great American President said a magic sentence at a wall and the Soviet Union fell over like a stack of tin cans.

Both stories are fun. Both are wrong, and the second one is wrong in ways that conservatives should care about, because a movement that tells itself a fairy tale is a movement that will fail the next exam. So here are seven claims, some that come mostly from the left, some mostly from the right, each tested against the dates and documents. I'll give a verdict on each, and some of the verdicts will annoy my own side. That is the price of being straight.

Myth one: Reagan was a reckless warmonger

The claim. The 1980s were a nuclear near-miss caused by a cowboy President's bluster, and we survived by luck.

The test. Start with what is true. Reagan's rhetoric was sharp. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando on March 8, 1983, he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," and two weeks later he announced a missile defense program. The Soviet leadership, for its part, was tense. In November 1983, NATO ran a command-post exercise called Able Archer 83, which rehearsed nuclear release procedures, and Soviet intelligence, which was already running an operation to detect signs of a surprise attack, reacted nervously. A KGB officer working for the British, Oleg Gordievsky, reported the anxiety to his handlers. That is real.

Now what happened next. Reagan was struck by the evidence that Soviet leaders were truly afraid of an American attack. In January 1984 he gave a speech that struck a conciliatory note, calling for dialogue and saying that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought. He used force sparingly: the Grenada landing in October 1983 was brief, and after the Beirut barracks bombing he pulled the Marines out. Between 1985 and 1988 he met the Soviet leader four times.

Verdict: mostly false. The danger of miscalculation was real, and historians still argue about how close the world came during Able Archer, with some saying it was a close call and others saying the Soviets never believed an attack was coming. But "reckless" does not fit a man who used his firmness to open talks.

Myth two: the "evil empire" speech was bluster that closed the door to peace

The claim. Moralizing about the Soviets made diplomacy impossible.

The test. The speech did not close the door, as the rest of the decade shows. What it did was refuse to pretend. A Soviet system that imprisoned its dissidents, shot people trying to cross the Berlin Wall, and invaded its neighbors was, by any ordinary standard, a tyranny, and saying so did not stop Gorbachev from sitting down at Geneva. Some of the people living under the system said the words mattered to them. Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident who spent years in the Gulag, has said that the speech lifted the spirits of political prisoners, who passed the news from cell to cell.

Verdict: false. Candor is not the enemy of negotiation. The negotiators of the 1980s wrote treaties after the speech, not before it.

Myth three: Reagan just got lucky

The claim. The Soviet Union was doomed anyway, so the American President was a bystander at a funeral.

The test. There is an honest half here. The Soviet system had deep structural problems: a stagnant planned economy, a falling price of oil in 1985 and 1986 that cut into hard-currency earnings, a costly war in Afghanistan, a leadership that was elderly and changing quickly. In April 1986, the Chernobyl disaster exposed the rot in the system. Nobody should say Reagan single-handedly produced any of that.

But "doomed" is a word that historians should use with care. Plenty of weak states stagger on for decades, and in the 1970s many Western governments treated the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture and planned accordingly. What changed in the 1980s was the pressure from outside, which narrowed Moscow's choices: the military buildup, the missile deployments in Europe, support for resistance movements in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and a refusal to reward bad behavior. The rest, in the end, is a counterfactual that nobody can run.

Verdict: half true. The Soviet system was ailing. Policy decided when, how and how peacefully the crisis arrived. Our own reasoning on how pressure and negotiation worked together appears in The Star Wars Joke That Helped Bring the Soviets to the Table.

Myth four: Gorbachev did it alone

The claim. Some on the right and many on the left say the story is really about one man, the Soviet reformer who chose to let go.

The test. Gorbachev deserves real credit, and a conservative should say so plainly. He took over as General Secretary in March 1985. He chose not to use Soviet force to keep Eastern Europe in the fold in 1989, and in the end he accepted the loss of the Soviet Union itself without a civil war. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Many hard-line rulers in his position would have sent in the tanks.

But a reformer needs a counterpart. Gorbachev came to the table in a weaker position than his predecessors, and the arrangements he accepted, from the elimination of intermediate-range missiles to the verification regime, were ones the Soviets had rejected for years. The Reykjavik summit of October 1986 shows the pattern. Gorbachev wanted an end to missile defense research, and Reagan said no. The negotiation that followed produced a treaty on Reagan's terms.

Verdict: false as a solo story, true as part of a duet. It took two men, one of whom was willing to stop and one of whom was willing to hold firm.

Myth five: Reagan never compromised

The claim. On the right, the legend runs that he held the line without giving anything up. On the left, the legend runs that he was an ideologue who would not talk.

The test. Count the meetings. Reagan and Gorbachev met at Geneva on November 19 to 21, 1985, at Reykjavik on October 11 and 12, 1986, in Washington from December 7 to 10, 1987, and in Moscow from May 29 to June 2, 1988. At Geneva they issued a joint statement saying that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. At Washington they signed the INF Treaty. In Moscow Reagan walked through Red Square. These were not the acts of a man who would not talk.

The treaty itself was a compromise. It accepted on-site inspection, which the Soviets had long resisted, and it required the Soviets to destroy more missiles than the United States did. Some conservatives, including some prominent figures in the movement at the time, thought Reagan was giving away too much. They were wrong, in my judgment, but it is worth noting that they existed. The movement was not unified behind him, and the record shows that he took heat from his own side for negotiating.

Verdict: false. He was firm and he was flexible, which is what a good negotiator is.

Myth six: the INF Treaty left Europe naked

The claim. Removing a class of missiles weakened the West.

The test. The INF Treaty, signed on December 8, 1987, eliminated the Soviet and American ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between roughly 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The missiles it removed from Europe were the ones that put European capitals under the shortest warning times, and the Soviets had to destroy substantially more of them than the United States did. Reagan used a Russian proverb at the signing, "trust, but verify," and the treaty included inspections to back it up. The Senate gave its consent in 1988.

The treaty lasted until 2019, when the United States left it after concluding that Russia had been violating it for years. That fact cuts both ways. It shows that arms control works only when the other side keeps its word, a point conservatives have always made. It also shows that the agreement did good work for three decades.

Verdict: false. It was a strategic win, and a model of the kind of deal conservatives can accept: unequal cuts, real inspections and no trust required.

Myth seven: he said one sentence and the wall fell

The claim. In Berlin on June 12, 1987, Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the wall, and that was that.

The test. The speech at the Brandenburg Gate was a fine one, and it mattered. But the wall fell on November 9, 1989, nearly two years later, and Reagan was out of office by then; George H. W. Bush was President. The fall came after a summer of East Germans fleeing through Hungary, mass protests in Leipzig, and a Soviet decision not to use force. The Soviet Union itself lasted until December 1991, when Gorbachev resigned on December 25 and the Soviet legislature voted the union out of existence the next day. In between there had been a coup attempt in August 1991.

None of this diminishes Reagan. It describes how long the process was. A policy of firmness and negotiation does not produce its results in a speech; it produces them over years, and it is finished by the next administration.

Verdict: half true. The speech was a statement of moral clarity in the right place. But the work was done by pressure, patient diplomacy and the courage of millions of people who lived under that system. It is a disservice to them to say a sentence did the job.

Why the myths persist

It is worth asking why these stories survive when the dates are so easy to look up. The answer is that each one does a job for the people who tell it. The reckless-cowboy story lets a political opponent look back and say the danger came from the other party's hero. The one-sentence story lets a movement feel that its leader's words are magic, and that the next leader can work the same magic by being just as loud. The Gorbachev-alone story flatters people who believe that the powerful are driven by moods and not by pressure. And the lucky-bystander story saves everyone the trouble of asking whether policy ever matters.

A myth is a convenience. The cure is a calendar. If you line up the events in order, you see a decade in which an American President rebuilt the military, deployed missiles in Europe, backed anti-Communist fighters, announced a missile defense program and spoke bluntly about the nature of the Soviet system. In the same decade he wrote to a series of aging Soviet leaders, sat down with the last of them four times, signed a treaty that removed a class of weapons, and left office with the Soviet Union still standing and the outlook much changed. Then his successor, with Gorbachev, managed the endgame. No single event in that list is the cause. The list is the cause.

If you want to teach a teenager one thing from this period, teach that. Real history is a sequence, and anyone who hands you a single moment and calls it the whole story is either selling something or has not read the book.

The scorecard

Count the verdicts. One was mostly false, four were false, and two were half true. No myth survived intact. The left's picture of a reckless cowboy fails on the record. The right's picture of a one-man victory fails too, and the right is harmed more by its own legend than by the left's, because a legend invites you to believe you can win again by repeating the same sentence.

What survives is better than either legend. A President of principle who kept the pressure on, built the strength, offered a deal, and would not take a bad one. A Soviet leader of unusual realism who understood in the end that his system could not compete. And a long grinding process in which the courage of ordinary people mattered more than any phrase. For the roots of the strategy, see George Kennan's Long Telegram and the Strategy That Won the Cold War, and for how the same ideas fit together in a longer sweep, see Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works and How the Reagan Doctrine Turned Containment Into Rollback.

The bottom line

• The cowboy-warmonger story fails on the record. Reagan used force sparingly and met Gorbachev four times between 1985 and 1988.
• The one-sentence-victory story fails too. The wall fell in November 1989 and the Soviet Union ended in December 1991, both after Reagan left office.
• Credit Gorbachev honestly. A reformer who chooses not to use the tanks deserves it, and it does conservatives no harm to say so.
• Pressure and negotiation worked together. Keep both tools in the box.
• When someone gives you a clean, one-cause story about how a great power fell, check the dates.